Of course we atheists will look at what you posted rather critically. What do you mean that the problem is the amount of time evolution takes? What are your standards? Are millions of years inadequate. Billions? How long should it have taken if it were natural vs. intelligently designed? Those of us who accept the standard model of evolution don't seem to be as perplexed as you think we should be. Please explain.

By the way, dogs are one species that comes in various models. In just a few thousand years we have created everything from Bull Mastiffs to those barky little bastards only grandmothers are permitted to own. But they are just one species. A Shitzu can impregnate a Great Dane. It is recommended that the experiment not be reversed, for obvious reasons. Still. Just one species. So you really can't use that as an example.

Thanks, for the welcome... I hope you find what I say to be constructive.. I believe that shouting and hate speak don't really help advance a discussion. It is wonderful to see that you share the same views.

To defend my original comment I would first look at the Cambrian explosion... in a short period of time "by evolutionary standards" the diversity of life increased immensely. Next, the origin of live itself would require an organism that is able to reproduce, for it to reproduce it first needs to be singular, in other words something has to separate from its environment, Assuming that it was by random chance that life was created... The time it would take not to only create life, but also by random chance an organism that could reproduce is astronomical, then you have the likelihood that many of the first species were killed before they grew to a level of sustainable population. If liquid water appeared on the earth 4.3 billion years ago, No I can't reasonably say that life was created and evolved to sentience in that time period. My last defense I'm going to mention is one you probably hear allot... Irreducible Complexity. Not to say that Irreducible complexity makes evolution impossible. However, it does slow it down significantly... This also brings in the idea of random chance, if a mutation does not yet create an advantage for an organism, the chance that it is passed down decreases... so if we are leaving the process of evolution up to the roll of a dice, I believe it takes much to long to happen on its own.

Onto my Dog argument, I understand that Dogs are all the same species. However, the quick change in the species's traits does suggest that when evolution is helped along by intelligent control the results can be seen much quicker... Dogs may all be the same species, however given more time of selective breeding with the goal of changing the species, a new species could be created in a much shorter time frame than natural evolution, I find that Idea at least very hard to refute.

Finally, I am not a creationist by any means, however I find myself irritated by the blind acceptance of the theory of evolution... There are far to many unanswered questions for it to be considered as factual as it is. In my opinion there is not nearly enough evidence to believe in evolution on its own merit. So then, I guess then its believers require faith in the idea that its true.

mhaberling

Sorry. I forgot to check this thread yesterday to see if you had responded. My bad.

You are mistaking your incredulity as a fact. That you can't imagine how something could have worked doesn't automatically make it impossible. People used to claim human flight was impossible. When I was a kid before we got things into orbit, some people insisted it was impossible to get a rocket to go fast enough.

Are all the answers in about evolution? Of course not. But it is a good enough theory that it can be used to predict. It predicted long ago that common genes would exist in widely varied organisms. And guess what. We have genes in our bodies that identical to genes in yeast cells, and that do the same type of thing.

The lessons of evolutionary theory are used to help deal with the drug and pesticide resistance we encounter when organisms evolve to survive currently used drugs and fertilizers. If we didn't have an understanding of the theory, biology would be a much less complete science. Your doggie stuff is yet another example. We can now very much speed up the creation and improvement of dog breeds because we know far more about how to do such things thanks to the theory of evolution and all that it taught us about inheritence.

Our knowledge of when certain types of early life forms lived, be they dinosaurs or mammals or plants, corresponds rather exactly with the order in which fossils are found in the ground. If you think it wrong, all you need to do is go out and find the fossilized remains of a Megalosaurus alongside the remains of a Tyrannosaurus and you will have disproved hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

If you think we should ignore evolutionary theory, you won't really be able to get a flu shot next year because we won't have any way of accurately predicting which variations are the most likely to show up next. And it can be used for the wrong reasons too. The company that makes Roundup, a herbicide, used their knowledge of how evolution works to create test weeds that were not killed by their product. Then they let them get out in the wild. So now there are weeds that used to be killed by their product that can't be. But don't worry. They'll come up with something to sell alongside the original product so that you can have both. Funny how selling stuff for $100 a gallon can motivate one to take advantage of that theoretical framework.

No, it doesn't matter how much sense it makes to you. The evidence says otherwise and the evidence has proven itself useful to modern science again and again. I wish it could both be sensible to you AND useful, but if I have to pick one or the other, I'll go with the useful part.

You are not a creationist, but you still need a backstory that you can sink your teeth in to. Okay. That is your right. But like most everything else in the world, there are lots of possible explanations for a lot of things. I personally prefer the ones that work.